Paste Image Roll Script

PasteImageRoll is was designed to tile images into a single document so they could be printed on one long piece of roll photo paper. To minimize paper waste and trimming scraps on your floor. If all images have the same orientation like a collection of student portraits the printed composite may also be a good wall hanging or banner.

Adobe removed Picture Package from Photoshop PasteImageRoll can be used to create picture packages that contain single size print images.

No document need be open when you use the PasteImageRoll script. The script will display a simple configuration dialog with default setting. You can change the default setting to better suite your setup by editing the script and adjusting the six default vars in the beginning of the script. Change any setting that need changing for the current run in the dialog. When you confirm the setting by clicking on the OK button you will be put into a open dialog where you can select a folder where your images are then within that folder select all the images you wish to print.

A user asked for and option to have white or black frames around the images. I did not want to mess with the script or add addition code length. So I added two Photo Collage Image Layer styles to add small white and black frames created with layer styles. I updated the "JJmack's Photo Collage Toolkit Scripts" action set to include the new scripts and added two actions the will add Black or White frames to a created pasteimageroll document.

Thinking about the user request again realize no extra code length would be required. All that would be need was to add a couple of variables to the current calculations and externalize the in the Script dialog. So I added two new field to the scripts dialog. One for the border size to be added around the document to frame the files and the other for the grout size the spacing between images. Both are defaulted to 0 inches. so if you want image spaced out a 1/5 of an inch with a 1/5 inch border about the document use .2 in both fields.

A user asked for and option would change PastImageRolls operation to not rotate image orientation to match the tile's orientation. To just fit portrait images into landscape tiles and landscape images into portrait tiles. So I added a rotate for best fit and option to the dialog.

Paste Image Roll Dialog

DPI The print resolution you want the document to have.

Copies The number of copies to make of selected images.

Width The Roll Paper width in inches.

Length The remaining length of paper in feet. If left empty the script will use 100 ft instead.

Width Tile cell width in inches. For best results the cell width should divide into the paper width evenly.

Height Tile cell height in inches.

Border size in inches like .2 for 1/5" on the documents four sides

Grout size image spacing in inches. Border and Grout should both be 0 for no white space.

The Tile cell size is check to see if it will fit within the paper size. The cell size width is use to calculate the number of columns that will fit on the paper. There will be no space between tiles. For best results the tile cell width should divide into the paper width evenly so no paper will be wasted and none will need to be trimmed off after printing. The required number of rows is calculated by dividing the number of images select by the number of columns being printed. Once the number of rows is known the length of paper needed is determined and compared the length available for printing. If all the checks pass a new document of the correct size will be opened and the selected images will then be opened orientated resized using bi cubic interpolation and pasted into the document as a new masked layer. Then the layer will be centered over its tile location. Photoshop supports something like 8000 layers so there should be no problem printing as many images as you need. If an image aspect ratio is different then the tile area it will look like a centered crop. After the script completes tiling the images you may want to tweak of some images for better looking crop composition. Use the move or Free transform tools.

Here is an example of what 54 images tiles into 4"x6" cells would look like. It would need 7 feet of 16 inch roll paper for printing. Note how landscape images have been rotate to match the tile cell 4"x6" portrait aspect ratio. This example has been flattened and resized to 800 pixel wide for the web viewing. The print size document had 54 layers over the background layer its 300 setting made the canvas size 4800x25200 pixels 16" wide 7 feet tall.

Same 54 image on 17" roll paper with 1/5" borders and image spacing.

While it was not intended for Web image creation you could use this script for creating Web size images. For example if you needed the same 54 image for your Web site but only 800 pixel wide you could set the resolution to 50. For 16" at 50 DPI = 800 pixel wide.

Picture Package Support

Picture Package is not that hard to do using PasteImageRoll with this script its quite easy to create single image size picture packages. You could for example set it dialog to print at 300 DPI 12 copies of image on 8" wide paper that are 2"x3" in size. The when it prompts you to select images you could select one image and it would create a document with three rows of four images that are 2"x3" as 8"x9" document. If you have roll paper you can select many images. each will add 9" the the length of the document. A typical Dialog setup for a picture package.

Here is a downsize of two single size image picture package 12 copies 2"x3" using PasteImage Roll using the above setup where I seleted two images to be printed.

I also modified my BatchMultiImage collage script to populate templates with a single image so multi size picture packages are also possible. It not fast for it was not designed to create picture packages and my collage are created using placed smart object layer. So any image file format are supported and the final collage can be tweaked. All that overhead is over kill for Picture Packages. Here is an example picturepackage template used to create three prints on 8.5" by 11" sheet of photo paper you can Download. Here is a downsize populated picture package collage created using the BatchPicturePackage script.
You could also create a single size picture package template and use it to be able to batch picture packages for sheet paper with the BatchPicturePackage script.....